an invitation to seekers of beautiful things…

In the span of one year I lost both of my parents – each to their own prolonged illnesses. Our journey as a family was nothing short of extraordinary.

The experience pulled me far from my home, my job, my friends…everything that I called my own…everything that I called home.

I explain it sometimes as if I had gone off to war – because that’s what it was – it was the fight for my Mom and my Dad’s lives.

I dedicated three hard years to caring for and then saying goodbye to two of the greatest people I will ever know.

When I came home from that war I was terrified.

Something sacred had happened outside of my daily life.

It became harder and harder to connect with the people in my every day life – those people who were left behind with me, the people I knew I’d be making the next chapter of my life with, people in whom I place the deepest faith. It was just too hard to say – “I saw something awful and there was something glorious and beautiful in it, pass the salt.” My new normal didn’t seem to fit the shallows of everyday conversation.

I lost something sacred. I lost it slowly. I lost it increasingly day by day. I’m still losing it. In that loss, though, I saw new things. I saw deeper and better things. I saw more complex, more vulnerable, more truthful versions of these powerful people who’d parented me and instilled their own deep wisdom in me.

When things were their darkest, I learned to seek the tiniest moments of beauty and goodness in the world. I unwittingly – or perhaps intuitively – created a ritual with my dog that would come to change everything for me. Every morning I would grab his leash, walk to the door and say, “let’s go find the beautiful things!”

It was an invitation and a commitment to collaboratively seek out the good things of the world even when my world was darkest.

As good of a companion as he is, it now feels like it is time to take this collaboration to a broader audience and share these truths with someone other than my dog.

I’ve created this space as a sort of open call to all who wish to discover, share and celebrate all of the beautiful things that come our way.